No one is alien to the feeling of well-being, relief and liberation that all people experience, after an episode of laughter and even more if it is out loud. Laughter is the body’s response to a situation of humor. It seems simple: it is made up of facial movements and the sound that is emitted, but there is much more as it brings more benefits than you imagine.
Laughter can heal our body and emotions
When we laugh we feel very good and we even manage to forget our problems for a moment, because we activate certain neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine, releasing endorphins that produce pleasant sensations.
Laughter is a biological response produced by the body as a reaction to certain stimuli, mainly stress.
According to researchers at the London Institute of Neurology and the University of York , in Toronto, Canada, the exact place where a joke or a situation turns into laughter and laughter is located behind the forehead, which is the Brain area responsible for our sense of humor and smile, considered as the soft and silent manifestation of laughter.
Although some think that laughter is an unimportant topic, laughter and a sense of humor have been approached and studied over the years by different thinkers such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud and Oscar Wilde.
Laughter reduces stress hormones
Laughing is positive for our health because humor reduces stress hormones, also laughing out loud increases our heart rate, stimulates our immune system and strengthens our muscles.
Currently, thanks to the physical and psychological benefits that the act of laughing has, it is used as a palliative in the treatment of certain diseases. There are many situations in which you can participate to incur laughter and improve health.
Laughter therapy is a treatment aimed at improving the physical and psychological state through laughter , through techniques such as body expression, play, dance, breathing exercises and massages.
Being the act of laughing a situation that has a profound and positive impact on our lives, it is incredible how little we resort to it, forgetting all its benefits.
It is a fact that girls and boys laugh more than adults because children can laugh up to 200 times a day, and adults only laugh between 15 and 20, not because of disability, but because of excess problems.
Differences of laughter between men and women
Laughing benefits women and men equally, however, there are gender differences in the way we laugh, in the stimuli that make us laugh and in the number of times that women and men laugh.
When we laugh, most women tend to adopt a particular bodily attitude such as covering our mouth with our hand , a gesture that tends to be absent in most men, and it has also been seen that women’s laughter is sharper. .
In the cinema or theater, the laughter that is generally heard the most is usually male, perhaps due to the permission granted by society due to their gender role to express themselves more emphatically and openly than women.
The Stanford University researchers monitored 10 women and 10 men while they watched black and white cartoons, and concluded that there are similarities in the way men’s or women’s brains respond to humor, however they found that Certain regions of the brain were activated more in women than in men.
According to this study, women pay more attention to the language of humor, that is, the funnier the cartoon, the more the pleasure center is activated in the female brain.
It seems that in women, laughter is an important element when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, in addition, in us, laughter is more related to the social sphere and we use it unconsciously to face stressful and tense situations.
On the contrary, men use humor and laughter much more when it comes to discussing sensitive health issues, and use it as a mask that hides their fears, concerns and sensitivity.
Laughter is definitely an essential element to improve our quality of life and maintain stable health. Perhaps one way to start using our laughter as an ally for our well-being is to be attentive and attentive to the small details that appear on a daily basis, try to reduce weight and just smile … Try it! See what happens…